My ramblings about all things technical

Tag Archives: openstack

At todays VMworld Keynote VMware Integrated OpenStack version 3.0 is going to be announced. If you are like me and haven’t had a chance to learn about the VIO offering as a whole then let me give a basic overview and then what new capabilities and features are coming in the 3.0 release.

What is VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) ?

VIO is an “Integrated Product” Approach to OpenStack

Standard OpenStack Distribution (delivered as OVA)

Deploys & Manages Proven Production Architecture on VMware SDDC

Fully Supported by VMware

The features that have been released prior to the this release and the ones in this release are:

VIO 1.0 (Q1 2015)

Icehouse Based

VMware Platform Differentiation

Production Ready

Simplified Deploy

Day 2 Operation Workflows

Automated Patching

Fully Supported

VIO 2.0 (Q3 2015)

Kilo Based

Seamless / Automated Upgrade & Rollback

Backup & Recovery

Customisations

VIO 2.5 (Q2 2016)

Kilo Based

Compact Architecture

VM Template Import

Scale, Perf & Stability Improvements

Simplified Monitoring & Troubleshooting

NFV Features

VIO 3.0 (H2 2016)

Mitaka Based

Compact VIO

Import existing vSphere workloads

VIO 3.0 Mitaka OpenStack Release

Latest OpenStack Release

Tons of improvements

Improved day-to-day experience for cloud admins and administrators.

Simplified configuration for Nova compute service.

Streamlined Keystone identity service is now a one-step process for setting up the identity management features of a cloud network.

Enhanced OpenStack Client provides a consistent set of calls for creating resources no longer requiring the need to learn the intricacies of each service API.

Support for software development kits (SDKs) in various languages.

New “give me a network,” feature capable of creating a network, attaching a server to it, assigning an IP to that server, and making the network accessible, in a single action

VIO 3.0: Slimmer Full HA Architecture

VIO 3.0: Compact Mode

VIO 3.0: Import vSphere Workloads

VIO delivers AWS Productivity with Private Cloud Control

If you want to learn more about VIO then make sure you attend the VMware booth in the solutions exchange at VMworld US if you are attending the conference or speak to your TAM/VMware Sales representative for a demo or PoC.

One of the big and most popular skills that a large number of organisations nowadays are looking for is OpenStack experience and knowledge. But being able to learn this on VMware Fusion or VMware workstation isn’t always very easy and no one wants to pull apart their VMware environment either. So then the competition VMturbo are running at the moment around giving away a TurboStack Home Lab is perfect for those people like me wanting to learn OpenStack. VMTurbo are giving away an individually assembled TurboStack homelab that will be assembled by a VMTurbo engineer with the following specifications:

1x Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK

2x Corsair 8GB DDR3 RAM

1x 256GB Samsung 850 Evo mSATA Drives

1x Synology DS415 4-Bay NAS

2x Western Digital 1TB 3.5″ SATA Drives

1x Cisco SG300 10-Port Gigabit Managed Switch

5x Ethernet Cables

Leveraging the OpenStack Juno build, the TurboStack also includes a full NFR License to VMTurbo 5.2.

In order to bring control to OpenStack, VMTurbo has contributed to Nova (Compute), Cinder (Block Storage), Ceilometer (Telemetry), and Keystone (Identity) with the intention of bringing OpenStack confidently to your data center through community contribution, and with our industry leading demand-driven control platform.

If you are wondering what I mean with the vRealize name then below is a very quick summary:

vRealize Suite

VMware vRealize is changing the name of the management solutions into simpler packaging and suites and as announced at VMworld US, vRealize Air Operations,Automation and Business will be available soon to provide a new SaaS solution for VMware customers via the renamed vCloud Air offering.

vRealize Operations 6

There are a number of new features and enhancements in vRealize Operations 6.0 one of these is the new scale-out architecture allowing high resiliency and availability as well as self monitoring to ensure that if an instance/slice is lost, it is reported and brought back seamlessly.

vRealize Operations 6.0 is now providing a public set of RESTful API’s to allow customers and partners to extend as well as get information in and out with ease so that it can be used for custom reporting or in the case of a project i have been on recently will allow monitoring of vCAC DEM’s and automatic provisioning of more if required.

The management dashboard of vRealize Operations 6.0 has maintained the same three panels on health Risk and Efficiency to provide viewing and reporting of immediate and future problems as well as opportunities to optimise. With vRealize Operations 6.0 you now have a new section below each of the three panels there are now problem alerts which give you correlation of problems and the ability to click the alerts to see the details as shown below.

There is also the ability to dig deeper into the problems by using vRealize Log Insight which can send alerts into vRealize Operations 6.0 if certain problems arise and allow custom reporting and alerting for partners and bigger customers who are looking for custom reporting and deep analysis.

Below is a summary of all the new features and solutions in vRealize Operations 6.0 allowing reporting of public and private architecture as well as simplistic single pane of glass management.

One of the biggest abilities of vRealize Operations 6.0 that I really like and i think will make all the customers I see as a consultant very happy is the support for new SDDC and hybrid cloud platforms meaning you can now monitor and report on networking,storage, OpenStack and vCloud Air. This will truly allow you to manage and report on your whole SDDC environment.

vRealize Operations 6.0 NSX Management Pack

With vRealize Operations 6.o as shown above is the ability to monitor and report on SDN solution NSX. With vRealize Operations 6.0 there is a new management pack for NSX.In the image below, you can see the heat map showing the transport layer. The transport layer is effectively all of the transport nodes (NSX term for hypervisors). These boxes are the ESX hosts registered with NSX, grouped by a particular transport zone. Transport zone is a group of hypervisors that share the same transport behaviour. On the bottom, the widget shows the top talkers. If there is a lot of traffic, this widget can help us figure out which VMs are responsible for the most network traffic.

There are three NSX dashboards: NSX main dashboard, NSX logical topology and NSX Edge services.

The current view is from the NSX main dashboard. Currently, we are a seeing information for a particular NSX Manager instance. The control plane widget is all the objects corresponding to the NSX Manager (API and connection to the vCenter Server for configuration), Controllers (responsible for configuring switches), Edge (VMs that deploy certain logical network services like DHCP, Load balancer etc. ), Logical Routers (Distributed routers responsible for configuring the routing software on each individual host).

All the alerts related to NSX are captured in Open Alerts widgets. This is based on hard threshold violations. We can see a number of High Availability violations. We have 40-50 alerts that are configured out of the box. We have detailed documentation on each of these metrics and what the alerts mean.

vRealize Operations Management Pack for OpenStack

OpenStack is emerging as the leading cloud platform for enterprises and some SPs. VMware are going to provide a management pack to support OpenStack providers. It will mostly be sold to existing vSphere customers who have OpenStack deployments currently.

vRealize Operations 6.0 is going to enable both SMB and Enterprise customers who have either or both on premise and off premise workloads in their private or public clouds to monitor, report and make more efficient their environments. I am looking forward to working with vRealize Operations 6.0 and seeing all the capabilities especially through the RESTful API availability to enable my customers both large and small to get all the reporting and management they require integrated into their existing solutions.Make sure you watch the live VMworld keynote to learn more.